Free Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Ed Tarkington

said. “That’s a federal crime.”
    “He brought him back,” my father said.
    “Don’t you see, Askew?” Judge Bowman said. “If you’ll press charges, I can get the FBI involved.”
    “I don’t know, Prentiss,” the Old Man said.
    “You can drop the charges later if you want,” Bowman said. “After they’re brought home.”
    “I’m not sure it works that way, Prentiss,” the Old Man said.
    “Don’t tell me about the law, Askew,” Bowman thundered. “I’m a goddamned judge, for Christ’s sake!”
    “I’m sorry, Prentiss,” the Old Man said.
    “Damn it, man!” Judge Bowman cried. “My daughter!”
    Some seven months later, in October, Bowman looked up from the dinner table to find Leigh standing there in jeans and a filthy T-shirt, her hair smelling of woodsmoke, tears streaming down her face.
    I heard little about where they had been or what they had done—just that Leigh had come home on a bus ticket that originated in New Mexico. When asked why she had left with him, Leigh offered a simple explanation.
    “I failed my econ test,” she had said.
    What degradations Leigh Bowman might have endured on Paul’s behalf became the subject of considerable gossip. We were never able to ask Leigh what really happened or where Paul could be found. Before we even heard she’d returned, her father had already sent her away, “to rest.”
    The Old Man hired a private investigator to scour the campgrounds and hotels and loitering spots around Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but nothing came of the search. After a while, the glimmer of hope we had felt on Leigh’s return faded back to the dull ache we’d lived with in the long months since Paul had disappeared.
    I often found the Old Man staring absently out the windows of his study, chin propped on his hand, his eyes cast up to the horizon. Perhaps he was looking at the columns of Twin Oaks and remembering that long-ago night when he picked Paul up from the floor and took him in his arms and carried him across the long, wet field to safety. Or maybe he was still waiting for the purple car to appear at the end of the driveway so that he could run out to meet his son, once dead and now alive again, lost and found.
    I WAS NO LONGER “ROCKY.” There was no one left to call me that. Paul was gone, and so was Leigh—first, sent off by her father to some undisclosed locale, and then, after a while, back to school somewhere far away. Her father, at least, knew where she was. There seemed to be some understanding that we were not to be told.
    After a brief reign as the folk hero of Langhorne Elementary for having escaped Swift Justice by getting kidnapped by my own brother, I went back to being the quiet boy in the back of the room. The summer came, and another year, and another. By the time I passed on to middle school, I had regained my anonymity. Like Annie Elizabeth, Paul became a face in a picture frame, the things he did before he left like the half-true stories about Frank Cherry and Twin Oaks.
    Ronald Reagan took office, ushering in a great leap forward for the nouveau riche. Reaganomics might not have worked for most of America, but it was very good to the Old Man—for about seven years anyway. All the wealth enabled by those tax cuts and low interest rates had to be insured, after all. The Old Man managed to get on several boards and committees of small companies and charitable organizations, raising his civic profile and earning him invitations to play golf and cards with some of Spencerville’s most prominent snobs.
    After a while the Old Man stopped staring out the window hoping to see Paul running down the driveway. Still, he refused to allow my mother to box up Paul’s things.
    One afternoon when I was thirteen, I overheard my mother and the Old Man arguing. I shook my head in disbelief. Paul could still get between them, even after he’d been missing for four years.
    The disposal of Paul’s room had become a point of contention. Mother wanted